Covering Users With QoS by a Connected Swarm of Drones: Graph Theoretical Approach and Experiments

In this work, we study the connected version of the covering problem motivated by the coverage of ad-hoc drones' swarm. We focus on the situation where the number of drones is given, and this number is not necessarily enough to cover all users. That is, we deal with a budget optimization problem, where the budget is the number of given drones. We assume that each ground user has different QoS requirements. Additionally, each ground user has a weight that corresponds to the importance (rank) of the user. Moreover, we consider the case when there is no third-party entity that provides connectivity to the drones. In this paper, we propose a 3D deployment scheme with the given number of drones such that the sum of the weights (ranks) of the ground users covered by drones is maximized (when the covering radii satisfy QoS of these users), and the drones form a connected graph. We present a number of approximate solutions with provable guaranteed performance evaluation that have been validated also through the simulation platform.